Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia by Marcia Langton by Marcia Langton

$39.99 AUD

Category: Australian

Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country is a curated guidebook to Indigenous Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. In its pages, respected Elder and author Professor Marcia Langton offers fascinating insights into Indigenous languages and customs, history, native title, art and dance, storytelling, and cu ltural awareness and etiquette for visitors. There is also a directory of Indigenous tourism experiences, organised by state or territory, covering galleries and festivals, national parks and museums, communities that are open to visitors, as well as tours and performances. This book is essential for anyone travelling around Australia who wants to learn more about the culture that has thrived here for over 50,000 years. It also offers the chance to enjoy tourism opportunities that will show you a different side of this fascinating country - one that remains dynamic and is filled with openness and diversity. ...Show more

Australian Heist by James Phelps

$39.99 AUD

Category: Australian

Australia's Number 1 True Crime Writer on Australia's Greatest Gold Robbery. On 15 June 1862, a gang of bushrangers held up a gold escort at Eugowra, just east of Forbes, NSW. They escaped with a pile of cash and 77 kilograms of gold, worth about $10 million today. It remains the largest gold robbery in Australian history. In this riveting re-creation of the events, James Phelps finally tells the full story of how Frank Gardiner, Ben Hall, John O'Meally, Johnny Gilbert, Henry Manns, Alexander Fordyce, John Bow and Dan Charters planned and executed the robbery - and what happened to all that gold. Australian Heist is a thrilling, fast-paced and thoroughly modern take on one of the most extraordinary episodes in the nation's history, by Australia's number-one true-crime writer. ...Show more

Australia The Photographers Eye by Nick Rains

$39.99 AUD

Category: Australian

Award-winning photographer Nick Rains travels Australia with his camera, capturing the country's diverse landscapes and many moods. With this second edition including five additional touring regions, Australia: The Photographer's Eye displays Rains's stunning images of over 30 regions around the countr y. For each region there's also touring information and a map that pinpoints the best spots from which to capture your own images. In the photo tips section at the back of the book, Rains shares his knowledge of photography, discussing the techniques and skills he has gained over many years, and clearly explains how to successfully photograph landscapes from small-detail shots through to panoramas. ...Show more

Australia's First Spies - The Remarkable Story of Australian Intelligence Operations, 1901-45 by John Fahey

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian

The first systematic account of Australian intelligence operations in the early 20th century offers fascinating new insights into Australian politics and international relations.

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia by Anita Heiss

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian

Childhood stories of family, country and belonging   What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high -profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart - sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.   This groundbreaking collection will enlighten, inspire and educate about the lives of Aboriginal people in Australia today.   Contributors include: Tony Birch, Deborah Cheetham, Adam Goodes, Terri Janke, Patrick Johnson, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jack Latimore, Celeste Liddle, Amy McQuire, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Miranda Tapsell, Jared Thomas, Aileen Walsh, Alexis West, Tara June Winch, and many, many more. ...Show more

Napoleon's Australia by Terry Smyth

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian

A fascinating insight into French ambition and amity in Australia, bursting with joie de vivre' - David Hunt, bestselling author of Girt In the northern winter of 1814, a French armada set sail for New South Wales. The armada's mission was the invasion of Sydney, and its inspiration and its fate were i nterwoven with one of history's greatest love stories - that of Napoleon and Josephine. The Empress Josephine was fascinated by all things Australian. In the gardens of her grand estate, Malmaison, she kept kangaroos, emus, black swans and other Australian animals, along with hundreds of native plants brought back by French explorers in peacetime. And even when war raged between France and Britain, ships known to be carrying Australian flora and fauna for 'Josephine's Ark' were given safe passage. Napoleon, too, had an abiding interest in Australia, but for quite different reasons. What Britain and its Australian colonies did not know was that French explorers visiting these shores, purporting to be naturalists on scientific expeditions, were in fact spies, gathering vital information on the colony's defences. It was ripe for the picking. The conquest of Australia was on Bonaparte's agenda for world domination, and detailed plans had been made for the invasion, and for how French Australia would be governed. How it all came together and how it fell apart is a remarkable tale - history with an element of the 'What if?' No less remarkable is how the tempestuous relationship between Napoleon and his empress affected the fate of the Great Southern Land. ...Show more

Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp by David Sornig

$35.00 AUD

Category: Australian

In Blue Lake,David Sornig examines how the 8km-square zone to the west of central Melbourne became the city's blind spot. Once a fertile wetland with a large blue saltwater lagoon, it passed through various incarnations- from boneyards and rubbish tips; through the Depression-era Dudley Flats shanty tow n; to the modern-day docks. Through it all, one thing that has persisted is its uncanny, liminal quality. As well as being a social history and a psychogeographic contemplation, Blue Lake is a biography of three specific characters- Elsie Williams, a Bendigo-born singer of Afro-Caribbean origin; Jack Peacock, the king of Dudley Flats' tip-scavenging economy; and Lauder Heinrich Rogge, a German hermit who lived for decades with sixty dogs on a stranded ship. By charting the rises and falls in their individual fortunes, Sornig reveals much about the race and class divides of their times and explores questions about those strange and singular places in the urban fabric where chaos is difficult to contain. In masterful prose, Sornig reveals cracks in the colonial mythology of the ordered vision of progressive, urban Melbourne - a place where identities, both personal and public, have never quite been resolved. In doing so, he encourages readers to look harder at the places they live in - at the streets they walk, the buildings they enter, the empty spaces they pass - and to see in them intricate layers of time and history that have been hidden from view. ...Show more

Humans in Melbourne by CHRIS CINCOTTA

$49.99 AUD

Category: Australian

Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude That Shaped the Western World by Peter Moore

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian

The Enlightenment was an age of endeavours. From Johnson's Dictionaryto campaigns for liberty to schemes for measuring the dimensions of the solar system, Britain was consumed by the impulse for grand projects, undertaken at speed. 'Endeavour' was also the name given to a Whitby collier bought by the Ro yal Navy in 1768 for an expedition to the South Seas. A commonplace, coal-carrying vessel, no one could have guessed that Endeavour would go on to become the most significant ship in the history of British exploration. Endeavour famously carried James Cook on his first great voyage, visiting Pacific islands unknown to European geography, charting for the first time New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia and almost foundering on the Great Barrier Reef. But Endeavour was a ship with many lives. She was there at the Wilkes Riots in London in 1768. During the battles for control of New York in 1776 she witnessed the bloody birth of the United States of America. As well as carrying botanists, a Polynesian priest and the remains of the first kangaroo to arrive in Britain, she transported Newcastle coal and Hessian soldiers. According to Charles Darwin, she helped Cook add a hemisphere to the civilised world. NASA named a space shuttle after her. To others she would be a toxic symbol, responsible for the dispossession of the oldest continuous human society and the disruption of many others. No one has ever told Endeavour'scomplete story before. Peter Moore sets out to explore the different lives of this remarkable ship, from the acorn that grew into the oak that made her, to her rich and complex legacy. ...Show more

The Balfour Correspondent by JAMES DRYBURGH

$39.95 AUD

Category: Australian

The Fierce Country: True stories from Australia's unsettled heart, 1830 to today by Stephen Orr

$27.95 AUD

Category: Australian

The Fierce Country holds no malice, but neither pity. It just sits, and bakes, and waits. We do the rest. We provoke it when we mine above its aquifers. Weaken it, and ourselves, when we leave mountains of asbestos to blow away in the wind. Misunderstand it when we see it as nothing more than a resource . Resent it when it takes our children. The Fierce Country, perhaps, is in our minds as much as anything. The open spaces and isolated places outside Australia's cities have unsettled us from first European settlement to today - often with very good reason. In this nail-biting book combining the notorious and little-known, acclaimed author Stephen Orr has collected true stories that have shaped and continue to haunt the Australian psyche: mysteries, disappearances, mistreatment and murder. Fatal conflicts between an Aboriginal tracker and the police employers hunting his community. An itinerant conman picking up tips for the perfect murder from a famous novelist around a campfire on the Rabbit-Proof Fence. A schoolteacher and her students kidnapped en masse in 1970s rural Victoria. And that fateful day when Peter Falconio pulled over beside a desert highway. Together these tales chart an undercurrent of shifting cultural tensions as Australians find, lose and question who we are. ...Show more

Australia in Focus by Steve Parish

$34.95 AUD

Category: Australian | Series: Australia in focus S.

Australia is an ancient island continent of contrasts and extremes, from lush tropical rainforests to the parched deserts of the inland. The continent's diversity of climates, landforms and habitats are home to an array of fauna and flora, many unique to Australia. At sixteen sites, the natural and cult ural heritage values are so outstanding that they have been inscribed on the World Heritage List. In these, and in national parks and reserves, the country's natural treasures are protected and preserved. ...Show more